Memories of 1963 Norwich flood still fresh after 50 years

Growing up at 55 Lake Street in the 1960s, Tony Orsini saw his neighborhood like a family picnic. Everybody knew everybody in the Little Italy section of Norwich. Doors were unlocked. Televisions were shared.At about 9:30 p.m. on March 6, 1963, the 19-year-old was getting ready for bed. A gifted athlete, he had ...

Growing up at 55 Lake Street in the 1960s, Tony Orsini saw his neighborhood like a family picnic. Everybody knew everybody in the Little Italy section of Norwich. Doors were unlocked. Televisions were shared.

At about 9:30 p.m. on March 6, 1963, the 19-year-old was getting ready for bed. A gifted athlete, he had just finished up a Norwich City League basketball game and was exhausted. His downstairs neighbors, Ronnie and Margaret “Honey” Moody, were unusually restless — spurred by the rush of water pulsing down Little Italy’s main road.

The water came from the Spaulding Pond dam in Mohegan Park, which after two days of rain had started to leak, first a little, and then more, before giving way. Six people would be killed in the flood, including five workers at a mill in its path, and it would create severe damage all the way into downtown.

But there was no way for the Orsini or Moody families to know that then.

Instead, confused and concerned the situation could get worse, the Moody family — Ronnie, Margaret and their three young children — decided to head to Ronnie’s mother’s house across the city. Orsini opted to join them and urged his father, Pasquale, to do the same, but he refused to leave home.

“We made it right around the corner when the wall of water hit us from the playground and floated us along and eventually flipped the car over,” Orsini said recently as he stood in front of his childhood home.

Orsini acknowledged that, after 50 years, his timeline of that horrific night can’t be trusted. But the memories are still vivid.

After floating about 25 feet, Orsini and Ronnie Moody managed to open the car’s doors, battling the frigid, knee-deep water around them.

“Honey” Moody helped get her children to high, dry ground with Ronnie. As he turned around to grab her hand, he lost his grip and watched her get swallowed by that unforgiving torrent. Officials found her body the next day, right next to the overturned car.

“It happened so fast that a lot of it was just instinct,” Orsini said.

The Spaulding Pond dam in Mohegan Park was constructed from the earth itself. By 1963, the 8-foot high, 220-foot long embankment was more than 100 years old.

In 1853, harnessing the power of a water feed at the south end of what is now Mohegan Park promised to boost the prospects of downtown merchants by providing propulsion for their water wheels.

So established Norwich businessmen Pedediah Spaulding and Henry Allen went about the process of strengthening an earthen dam on the property that was built in 1833, with no eye toward engineering or design parameters.

Page 2 of 4 - In 1906, Norwich officials took control of the vast acreage of Mohegan Park — and the dam that held back the pond’s 45 million gallons of water.

The dam had a history of “seepage from time to time,” according to a March 18, 1963, report by Corporation Counsel Orrin Catarshick to the City Council on the dam break.

From March 5, 1963, into the morning hours of March 6, Norwich collected almost 2 inches of rain, itself causing localized flooding in low-lying areas of the city.

Spaulding Pond, covered by a thick layer of ice, was in fact leaking during the day on March 6. It finally gave way that night, and millions of gallons of water came cascading through Mohegan Park and continued onto Brook Street and Baltic Street. Riding on top of the 10-foot-high wall of water were blocks of ice, some the size of kitchen tables.

Just up the road from the Orsini house, 6-year-old Gina Lanteigne had a bird’s eye view of horror.

Despite the pleas of a policeman to evacuate, the workers at the Turner-Stanton Mill rushed to the second floor for a glimpse of what looked like a waterfall out the window.

Eventually, the weight and force of much water and ice buckled the foundation of the 75-year-old mill, and it collapsed, killing four people working inside and another soon after.

“I remember seeing the mill go down. That was awful. It was a bad thing, and not something I ever want to see again,” Lanteigne said recently. “I was a little kid thinking, ‘What’s next? Am I going to drown?’ It’s very emotional.”

Lanteigne, who now lives in Griswold, has worked at the D’Elia’s Bakery and Grinder Shop at 272 Franklin St. for nearly 40 years. She has collected several pieces of memorabilia from the flood — including a reproduction of the next day’s Norwich Bulletin, which hangs on a counter in the sandwich shop.

“It was a very big tragedy. You want to keep it alive for the people who remember it,” she said.

Downtown, William Longo woke to the sound of huge oil drums carried by the dark waters knocking into the back of his building. He lived on the second floor, and his business, Longo’s Funeral Home, was on the first floor.

Quietly, he and his wife at the time crept to the rear porch to assess the scene.

“After a while, I heard a moan. We were listening and listening, but didn’t hear anything any more. We couldn’t get out of the house,” said Longo, now 78 and living in Tennessee.

He probably would have stayed out there longer, but was alerted to Orsini and the young Moody children tucked into the crevasse of an undersized maple tree. Longo told a city official who was in front of his property that a group of children was in the tree.

Page 3 of 4 - The next day, the flood waters receded enough for Longo to travel downstairs and see the extent of the damage to his business.

“All the floors of my funeral home were caved in,” he said.

And there, underneath all the rubble, was the body of 50-year-old Mae Caroline Robidou, one of the mill workers.

“She must have opened the back door of the funeral home and went right in with all the ice and water,” Longo said. “I think that moan I heard was her.”

Thomas Moody Jr., then only 4 and up in the tree with Orsini, remembered seeing Franklin Square illuminated in the night sky and thinking it was beautiful.

“And then my brother was screaming and it all came to me that, ‘Oh my God, this is serious,’ ” Moody said. “And the next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital.”

In November, Moody published “A Swift and Deadly Maelstrom: The Great Norwich Flood of 1963, A Survivors’ Story.” It’s a retelling of the event through the use of personal anecdotes, archival data and research that took him eight years to complete.

It began as a memoir for his family, but mushroomed into an exhaustive account of that March evening. Moody, a nuclear power plant supervisor who lives in Stephenville, Texas, wanted his children to know about their paternal grandmother, and after his father died in 2009, his resolve to do it by writing a book solidified.

Of course, Orsini needed to be remembered, too.

“Tony Orsini’s name in our house was like God. He was always very, very special,” Moody said. “I don’t remember everything that he did, but the fact he kept my brother under his coat and volunteered unequivocally to come with us that night as a 19-year-old says a lot for him.”

Wally Lamb, too, remembers that night vividly, as a boy seeing those “refrigerator-sized” blocks of ice that coasted by his 33 McKinley Ave. home. His new novel, “We Are Water,” fictionalizes the flood.

He still reflects on how inextricably tied so many people are from all reaches of the nation — the flood as a great uniter.

“All these years go by and all of the sudden we’re all linked in this. It’s pretty amazing,” Lamb said. “It created a sense of how fragile life could be and probably a fear, because all these uncontrollable things could happen, and they could all be game-changers in a very sudden way.”

Lamb was 12 when the flood struck. While doing research for his novel, he walked the flood’s path from Mohegan Park to Franklin Square with Moody, his three brothers and Orsini. Near the end of the journey, the five survivors stopped at the nondescript tree in front the former Lamparelli Motors warehouse, struck by the role it played that night.

Page 4 of 4 - That stunted tree still stands, just across from the Evans Memorial AME Zion Church on Chestnut Street.

Orsini and Moody call it the “tree of life.” Sitting in that crook between branches for nearly an hour, protecting a 4-year-old from the mayhem just below, Orsini’s life changed in a night.

“I count my blessings every day,” Orsini said. “I still don’t know how we survived. I still think about the six people who died and how unlucky they were, and how lucky we were. I think of Mrs. Moody as a wonderful neighbor and friend. And that’s how I want to be remembered — as trying to be a good neighbor.”